Yancek, Yeahhh! I'm stoked! I ls displayed all partitions first-up to see where root was. Chose the one W a filesystem. Then set path for grub to know, and set boot.

Next up, gonna scan C:, as it's still 46gb used, (tho 120gb all up now )and a bit sus. Bitdefender was recommended me by my world-famous comp.scientist friend. It really IS the very best, is from Romania & has AI in cloud of the most amazing developments. Highly, highly recommend. Superior protection.

Well I can't thank you guys enough telling me it really could be done! including Yancek, michaelc, colourpurple,& quickbreakfast!!

I don't know whether windoze still offers it, but consider defraging your windows storage. It might give your electronic marvel more windows space.

Because viruses need access to being root (su) in the linux world virus protection ain't really needed.

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I gave as much info to hopefully help someone else.It surprises me how 'cagey' ppl are about trying something fairly low-down in system layers (partition alteration), as only by daring to upheave these foundations can anyone learn + get basic info that will give them pointers to why other stuff doesn't work,etc. It totally surprised me many are so reluctant, as good backups r available everywhere.Its the only way U can learn, by putting stuff to the test,and assuaging your fears for while in order to get something valuable.I bought a cheap computer expressly to test things out with. I abhore the idea of a pretty OS and no idea what it relies on. I will be probably testg the basic undercarriage of OS,to DMA,controllers,and other fundament.boot processes to hardware , NVRAM,etc, in near future. Before Everything goes logical & virtual...

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Thankyou I actually tried that, even tho I've never had a PC this old. Tried disk cleanup too but that was a bit useless tbh; system reserve is tiny bit full but mostly for recovery directory, some boot;..some say U can transfer Recovery to sys32 & do away w it altogether using agent, or before install. Won't do that. However, scans so far from the legend-Bitdefender show nothing. The usual pagesys & hibersys file ~5-7GB, bit big, but they can tend to. Got rid of hibersys.Investigating VirtualBox for W7...Thanks 4 your help.

PS Sure is an electronic Marvel. It is a symbol of emancipation just as our Julian Assange says!

You might run chkdsk from windows on your windows C partition, generally recommended when you change the size of a windows partition.

Thanks Yancek my win actually already went to this straight away without asking! Found nothing odd.

Why?

Post number 4 of this thread https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ws-4175695147/ started at 4.25 pm (our time) says that you don't need a key for windoze 10.

So you might be able to run the current windoze (whatever that is).

Last night I got to thinking. Do you realise that you can access your windoze C: and D: drives, while running linux don't you? And have them, as part of the linux boot process, automatically mounted. Meaning that you can work on those files, or back them up, while running linux.

Edit to add. To see whether more space becomes available you might try copying your data to your backup wiping your data from the laptop then restoring the data back to where it came from........ Might give you more space on C: might not........ Maybe move your data from C: to D:

Wow that's awesome, thanks Quickbreakfast, I knew you could access Win files, but that's useful.

Also discovered U can place a (Linux only unfortunately) iso in Nautilus and edit grub cfg, menu, to access it from grub boot options. That's interesting how it can "pick" an iso up.

Never mind, I'll persevere.
Primarily my necessitates r win7 on hard disk somewhere as an option, that's what I bought this OLD laptop for, just to mess with and learn from. Just trying to learn about what is necessary for booting, procedurally.

But with virtual, I'm just interested with it for my other, newer laptop. I HV been investigating VirtualBox for a few months actually. Most my work website configuration for the company I'm helping update their site for is done on their server, & content management system, and I don't need a lot on my own PC.

So I'm just trying to learn boot procedures while at home, in my own time out of interest.